This is going to sound cruel, but for as nice a fella as Dusty Rychart is, and for as hard as he brings it on the court, and for as many obstacles as he’s overcome in his rags-to-Rudy climb to become the face of Minnesota basketball, here’s the most important thing you need to know about him: Dusty Rychart is not a good basketball player. Not good at all. Like, seriously bad. He shoots knuckleball J’s. He plods up and down the court. He can barely dunk-or even palm-a basketball, which is ludicrous considering he’s 6'7".

Think that’s a little too cruel? Please. You don’t know how cruel we could be. “Ever since I got here, I’ve told Dusty, We’ve got to get better players than you, players that are quicker, or bigger, or that shoot better.” Know who said that? Dan Monson, Dusty’s coach. Nice, huh? Wait. Another quote: “Does nothing great. Not physically gifted. No flash. Doesn’t even look like a player.” Any guesses? Okay, that’d be Dusty himself. Now that’s cruel.

So there. Dusty is not a good basketball player. Everyone says so. And now that everyone has said so, understand what a fantastic thing this is. Because talent would be wasted on Dusty. It would change who he is. What he is. What he’s done and what he can do.

With talent, it would mean nothing that he’s led UM in scoring and rebounding the last two seasons. With talent, his rise from unrecruited walk-on to All-Big Ten candidate wouldn’t register. With talent, he’d be just another player with 100 scholarship offers, agents up the butt and the world at his finger roll.

And who would care?

Without talent, though, he’s a guy who’s overcome. Without talent, he inspires. And without talent, he represents. The underdogs. The overachievers. The put-upon. The picked-on. And most important of all, his twin brother Jessy, who in nearly losing everything eight years ago from a mysterious illness everybody now calls Jessy’s Disease, gave Dusty his strength and drive and will to succeed. All of which to this day carries Dusty, who -- remember -- is not a good basketball player. Not good at all.

Like, seriously bad.

***

Mom is telling a funny story, just to get things going, about Dusty Rychart’s obsession with basketball. It’s a peculiar obsession, because he grew up in Grand Rapids, Minn. -- three hours south of Canada, four hours north of Minneapolis -- where kids obsess about hockey, not basketball. Not Dusty. When he was done with school, and done with practice, he’d come home and shoot in the driveway. When it got dark, he’d turn on the car lights and shoot. When it got cold, he’d turn on a Sheetrock propulsion heater and shoot. And when it got late, he’d go to bed and shoot. That’s right -- in his dreams.

“The cat would be lying on him in bed,” says Becky Rychart. “Dusty would flinch, and the cat would fly and hit the wall. Then we’d hear him yell, ‘Shoot the ball! Take it to the hole!’ ”

Dusty shrugs when he hears this story the next day, as if to say, So what? Lots of kids obsess over basketball, right? He no more than anyone else.

So what? So everything.

Dan Monson knows. When they first met, he thought Dusty was a scrub. Now? Well, now he knows where Dusty has come from and what he’s done. And now he knows you just can’t shake this guy. You just can’t. “He’s not quick enough to defend anybody,” Monson says, “but he kind of gets in their way. He’s not a great shooter, but they have to guard him. He doesn’t have the quickness to bounce around guys, but he finds a way to finish plays. And at the end of the night, he’s your leading scorer and rebounder.”

Amazing the battles obsession can win for you.

Rychart led Grand Rapids High in scoring and rebounding three straight years, made first-team All-State in 1997 -- and received just one scholarship offer, from D2 St. Cloud State. “I was so lost,” he says. Then an offer came from UM to walk-on, and he thought he was found. But when Rychart arrived on campus, the other guys dogged his Christian Laettner ’do, his beat-up sneakers, his lack of flash, his scrawny build. At practice, before hitting the showers, they’d wrestle him, throw him to the floor.

As for playing time? Well, then-coach Clem Haskins told Dusty he wished the rest of the team worked as hard. Assistants told him he could hang. And during his freshman year, when he redshirted, he even earned the respect of his teammates -- on the day junior Miles Tarver started jabbing his finger in Dusty’s chest and unleashing a fury of taunts. Dusty grabbed Tarver, dropped him and pinned him for a three-count. “From then on,” Dusty says, “no one messed with me.” But even after adding a few pounds and growing a few inches and working his butt off in practice for a year, he averaged only nine minutes his whole redshirt freshman season.

Then, on March 11, 1999, Dusty got his shot. Before the Gophers first-round Tourney game with Gonzaga, Haskins announced that four players had been suspended for their roles in a nasty academic cheating scandal that had just surfaced. Then he announced that Dusty was starting.

What? Against a Zags team that hadn’t bothered to file a scouting report on him, Rychart went for 23 points and 17 boards, leading the seven-deep Gophers to a near-upset. “On the outside, I’m mad as hell we lost,” Dusty says. “Inside, I’m happy as hell. That was my breakthrough.”

That June, Haskins gave Dusty his scholarship. Two weeks later, Haskins was forced to resign. A month later, in July 1999, UM hired its new head man: Dan Monson, the former Gonzaga coach, the guy Dusty had torched back in March. Good news for Dusty, right? Not exactly. Monson told Rychart in their first meeting that everyone had a clean slate -- in other words, 23 and 17 didn’t count. “I was like, man, the nerve,” Dusty says.

Rychart went on to lead the Gophers in scoring and rebounding his sophomore season, but the team won only four games in Big Ten play, and the players treated Monson like a stepfather, talking back to him and his assistants, affirming their loyalty to Haskins. Even Dusty, still bitter over how Monson had made him feel unwanted, bitched and moaned. Not surprisingly, he gained no ground with Monson. “He told me I was uncoachable,” Dusty says.

Monson’s words struck Dusty’s most sensitive nerve: He’d carved his game out of hard work, and now he was being called uncoachable? Dusty realized something had to give. And so he did.

“I didn’t like how I was that year,” he says. “It wasn’t me. So I changed.” So did his teammates, who accepted Monson’s ultimatum to get on board. Dusty led the team in scoring and rebounding again in 2000-01, only this time the Gophers earned an unexpected NIT berth. For a team that many predicted to finish last in the Big Ten, it was a remarkable feat. After the season, Dusty and Monson had another meeting. Says Dusty: “Coach told me, You’re a big part of this team. He made me feel wanted.”

This season, Dusty once again leads the team in scoring and rebounding, and the Gophers head into conference play looking to make a run at an NCAA bid. It’s worked out so far because Monson knows the deal. Everyone does now. You just don’t shake this guy. You just don’t.

So what? So everything.

***

Mom’s telling another funny story. In it, she’s sitting in the living room, watching TV, thinking about the twins that are on the way. One of them has been named already -- Jessy; she’s always liked the way “Jesse James” sounded -- but she still doesn’t have a name for the other. Then The Love Boat comes on. The captain’s inspecting the ship. He pulls out a white glove. He wipes the deck. “Oh,” the captain says. “Dusty.” Mom says,“Oh, Dusty!” And that’s the name that goes on the birth certificate.

Another funny story, Dad’s turn. On Aug. 11, 1978, the day the fraternal twins are born, Jessy comes first. He’s small, weak, under five pounds. Dusty comes second. He’s big, strong, over eight pounds. “Dusty hogged all the food,” jokes their father, Mike. Hearing her husband say this, Becky winces. It’s not really funny, not when she thinks about it.

One last funny story, Mom’s turn again. Growing up, the boys do everything together. They watch The Muppet Show sprawled out like Lincoln Logs on the living-room floor. They ride their hobby horse, two at a time. You know those plastic, indestructible three-wheelers they used to make? The boys go through four of them one year. Mostly, though, the Rychart twins play sports. Jessy likes hockey. Dusty prefers basketball. Jessy rebounds Dusty’s shots for an hour. Dusty shoots pucks at Jessy for an hour. They trade turns all day and don’t quit until bedtime.

“They were joined at the hip,” Becky says.

And then? Well, there is another story, but not a funny one. It’s one we have to hear to understand who Dusty Rychart is. Dusty, now 14, is sitting in front of the family TV watching the 1993 NCAA Final -- Fab Five vs. UNC. Jessy comes into the living room and asks where Mom and Dad are. “You know where they are,” Dusty says. “They’re at a party. Go away.” Jessy goes away. Five minutes later, he’s back: “Where are Mom and Dad?” Dusty’s annoyed: “Jessy, you know where they are. What’s wrong with you?” Jessy goes away. He comes back five minutes later, clearly upset: “Where are Mom and Dad?” Now Dusty’s angry: “Quit messing around, Jessy. Don’t ask me again.” Jessy leaves -- and he punches his bedroom door, cracking it in half. Dusty calls his parents: “I think there’s something wrong with Jessy.”

Eight months later, Christmas Day, Jessy is in a wheelchair, unable to walk, barely able to speak, a vacancy in his eyes when he looks at his mom, and his dad, even Dusty. There are no presents. No lights. No joy. Everything has been taken away from Jessy. And Jessy has taken everything away from them. “We always had a Christmas tree,” Dusty says. “You know, a cheesy tree. You could see the metal frame. That winter, we didn’t even have a tree at all. It just didn’t feel like Christmas.”

Nobody could tell Dusty what was wrong with his twin brother, because nobody knew. But Dusty saw enough in the weeks after that night he called his parents to know it was something bad. First, dizziness. Then, hallucinations. Then Jessy couldn’t sleep. Then he couldn’t talk. Then he couldn’t walk.

One doctor thought he had been taking drugs. Another thought he had Parkinson’s, or that he’d had a stroke. Finally, the Rycharts took Jessy to the Mayo Clinic, where neurologists submitted him to six spinal taps and a four-hour MRI. They took muscle graphs and nerve graphs. After all that, the best they could tell the family was that something was eating at Jessy’s brain.

The family called it Jessy’s Disease. Nobody could come up with a better name for it.

Dusty remembers this one July night when Jessy was sitting in the living room, watching TV. Suddenly he starts crying for Mom. Becky says, I’m right here, what’s wrong? He says, Someone just came out of the TV and touched my leg. Mom feels a chill. She packs Jessy and Dusty in the car. She drives around until 2 a.m., until she feels she’s going to drive into a ditch. As she drives back home, Jessy cries for Mom. What’s wrong, Mom asks him, what’s wrong? Jessy says, Paul Bunyan just put his foot through the windshield.

Dusty remembers that Jessy was in the hospital for 120 days from midsummer through midfall of 1993. He remembers his mom put 25,000 miles on the car. He remembers Mike worked nights at the paper plant and spent days by Jessy’s side. That they came home only to do laundry, to sleep for a couple of hours. Sometimes they didn’t come home at all, because they were so worried about what would happen to Jessy if they weren’t with him.

And Dusty remembers he was nowhere. He’d shoot hoops at the Y, then come home to an empty house. Sometimes his grandparents were there, or his aunt, or his uncle. But mostly it was an empty house.

“That’s where it would set in,” he says. “I didn’t think anyone cared about me. That was selfish, when Jessy is maybe dying, but when you’re growing up and you think no one cares about you? That’s hard.”

Dusty didn’t go to the hospital much. One time he went, but Jessy didn’t recognize him. He pretended he did, but he didn’t. Mike broke down. It was the first time Dusty ever saw his dad cry: “That night, I wondered if this was going to tear us all apart.”

That October, the hospital sent Jessy home in a wheelchair with a bottle of steroids. The steroids seemed to strengthen him, but they did things to his voice, his eyes, his mood. He would babble incessantly: Is Dad home from work yet? What’s for dinner? Where’s Dusty? Mom would stick a Tootsie Pop in his mouth just to muffle the noise, and sometimes he would babble with that Tootsie Pop in his mouth until he went hoarse. And he got mean, aggressive. One time Jessy took a swing at Dusty. Dusty ducked and punched Jessy in the ribs. Jessy crumpled to the floor. Dusty can’t forget that. He’s tried. “I know that it sounds mean,” he says. “But I had to.”

After that dreadful Christmas, Jessy finally started to turn the corner. The family constructed a makeshift rehab center in the basement so Jessy could begin to repair his body, and Jessy attacked the machines. He learned to walk again, and talk again. He returned to school the next spring, and ditched the wheelchair the next fall. He worked like mad to get his life back to normal.

Only “normal” was different now. The doctors couldn’t assure the family that Jessy’s disease had gone away permanently. The burden ground the family down. At one point Becky found herself unable to swallow. Mike was admitted to the hospital five times with chest pains. And Dusty slipped even deeper into a world of basketball. “Thank God he had the Y,” Becky says.

And Jessy wasn’t the same. Dusty could take one look at him and know that. By his senior year in 1997, Dusty had grown seven inches since Jessy went down; Jessy had grown one. Dusty was the star of the basketball team. Jessy wanted to try out for football, but the doctors told him no, it was too risky. He became the basketball team’s manager.

“Jessy never complained” Dusty says. “But my brother would tell my dad he was jealous. I knew. It had to kill him that he couldn’t play sports.”

Sometimes, Dusty felt guilty. Sometimes, he felt lucky. Mostly, though, he tried not to think about it at all. The spring of the boys’ senior year, Grand Rapids hosted the state sectional finals. If they won, they’d go to the state tournament for the first time in 72 years. Dusty had 26 points and 14 rebounds, and Grand Rapids won by 3. At the awards ceremony after the game, the first medal went around Dusty’s neck, the last one around Jessy’s. Mom and Dad were both in the stands, weeping. Dusty took a look at them, and then at Jessy, and ran off the court. He didn’t return for 10 minutes.

“It hit me what Jessy had been through, just to be there,” he says. “It hit me hard. Very hard.”

***

Now Dusty is telling a funny story, just to get things going. It’s about the Rychart family’s current obsession with ... Dusty. Every home game, they make the four-hour trip to Minneapolis. They order bulk copies of the game program to hand out back home. They can’t make it on every road trip, because money’s tight, but they have a video library of all his games. When Dusty comes home -- usually just for Christmas, maybe once or twice over the summer -- all they talk about is basketball.

Jessy’s the same way. When the twins talk, it’s rarely about how community college is going for Jessy, or about girlfriends, or about how Jessy wants to be a teacher, to help out kids in need. It’s almost always about basketball. Not once have they talked about the bad time. It’s too painful.

But Dusty thinks about it. He thought about it his freshman year, when things were so bad he actually called home and said he was transferring. His parents said no way. They said, you can’t quit now, not after what we’ve been through. Dusty knew what they really meant.

He thought about it during that Gonzaga game. He was nervous out there, and a little scared. But he knew his brother was watching, relishing the moment. Dusty knew what that really meant.

He thinks about it now, as his basketball career winds down. Yes, his parents pay him too much attention. But he knows it’s special for them to watch him live out his dream. And he knows what that really means. “Sure, they take it a little too far sometimes,” he says. “But I can’t do anything about it. The thing is ...”

Dusty shrugs, as if to say, So what? Lots of families obsess over basketball, right? His no more than anyone else’s.

So what? So everything.

This article appears in the January 21 issue of ESPN The Magazine.